Black Reconstruction in America

Black Reconstruction in America is a long historical essay by W. E. B. Du Bois, published in 1935, that reinterprets the Reconstruction era in the United States, the period after the Civil War when the South tried to reorganize itself after the abolition of slavery. Du Bois wrote at a time when the dominant academic historiography, associated with the so-called Dunning School, portrayed the period as a failure and minimized the contribution of African Americans. Against that view, he emphasized the agency of Black people, both enslaved and free, and framed Reconstruction as a missed opportunity to build a broader democracy.

The book grew out of earlier writings by Du Bois on the subject, including an 1901 essay and a paper delivered in 1909 to the American Historical Association, which had little influence at the time. In the early 1930s Du Bois received funding to write a book on the topic and set out the theses that would shape the work in a letter to his publisher. The book combines historical method with a Marxist analytical framework and relies heavily on economic data and primary sources from the former Confederate states. Its central argument holds that Black and white workers, who shared a class position, divided along racial lines after the war, which prevented an alliance against the white propertied class and paved the way for the return of white Democrats to power, the imposition of Jim Crow laws, and the disfranchisement of many Black citizens and poor whites.

In its chapters Du Bois describes the general strike of enslaved people who withdrew their labor from the plantations during the conflict, which he regards as a decisive factor in the outcome of the war and in the economic crisis of the Confederacy. He also examines the violence of paramilitary groups and the resistance of the planter elite to losing land and political control. At the same time, the author documents achievements of the Reconstruction governments, such as the creation of public primary education systems, public health departments and charitable institutions, and notes that later governments kept many of these measures even as they imposed racial segregation.

The book received favorable reviews at the time, but academic historians largely ignored it, since the Dunning School interpretation continued to dominate textbooks. From the 1960s onward, a new generation of historians reassessed the work and made it a key reference for studying African American agency during Reconstruction. In addition, the concept of the "public and psychological wage" that Du Bois developed to explain the racial identity of white workers became highly influential in whiteness studies.